Fall rolls around, and here I was at the Interactive Telecommunications Program!
Honestly, I was pretty lost for the first semester or so. But I definitely was not the only one. ITP prides itself on diversity of races, gender, sexual preferences, hair colors, piercings, age groups, "ironic" t-shirts, and most of all prior professional, technical, and artistic experience.
This diversity makes for an interesting group of people, no doubt. It definitely encouraged collaboration as everyone had something unique to bring to a project. It most definitely led to just about a complete lack of truly graduate level academic, conceptual and technical rigor, at least in most of the courses that I took. There were happy exceptions here and there......
I don't want to overly criticize ITP at this point, because my experience there wasn't completely bad nor do I feel like I could do a better job running the department, knowing a little bit about the politics of university life. I still have people there who I consider friends and colleagues. I will elaborate further in the future, as I do feel they're going down the wrong track these days despite their very public successes lately and I want to educate potential applicants about how I feel.
I'm definitely not going to name names here; you're more than welcome to e-mail me privately if you wish for more details.
I still had Toshio Iowai stuck in my head and I attempted to channel him after I picked up the basics of Shockwave (the very awful Lingo was the teaching language at the time at ITP) I worked hard to channel those musical works I had experienced the year before. Although I wasn't bad at "physical computing," (ITP's name for unconventional interfaces for interactivity), I began to be more interested in interactive 3D graphics for the web.
Despite a complete lack of prior experience and having to teach myself most of the material (the low technical ability standards carried over to most of the faculty as well), I was reasonably successful. With my friend and colleague Przemyslaw Moskal I co-created "3D Sound Sculpture," an interactive shockwave sound toy, which has maintained its popularity and is still getting played with and exhibited around the world (Przemyslaw recently took it to Poland). This and another shockwave piece comprised one half of a Interactive 3D kiosk at the Villette-Numerique digital arts festival in Paris, France.
I had the privilege of flying over to France that fall. The experience blew me away. The festival, and in particular the "net art" gallery where we exhibited, was extremely well attended and well presented by the organizers. The facility (the science and industry museum) and support were top notch. I will say that most of the works in the gallery itself were mediocre at best (including our constantly crashing kiosk), but I think that the advertising, support, and presentation of the works made it a massive success.
I went on to do more shows, this time in the New York area, with varying success. Eventually, I got tired of the whole process when I realized that these shows were doing absolutely nothing for my career and were sapping money and time away from me.
My graduate thesis was a disaster. I had a great thesis advisor who for the first time in my ITP career challenged me conceptually. I found it frustrating at the time but it wasn't because he was trying to be difficult with me, it was because he honestly cared about the final projects. The thesis ended up being a collection of prototypes of 3D music games as I explored different directions in interactive music design for games. It was not a good thesis at all, but it did hone my production and coding abilities.
My last year at ITP was also the year that I took a foundation class for incoming computer science students. Despite no formal training in programming, I aced the course. I remember basically racing with my classmate Dan Shiffman over IM to finish the assignment first. Up until my thesis, that was most of my life at ITP, utterly crushing the low expectations of the teachers and looking like a complete ass (sorry for the language) to everyone else who struggled with the material.
I graduated quietly. I didn't make very many friends with the faculty in the department and wasn't offered any post graduate research work. In many ways I had come full circle, just as lost professionally as I was when I first entered....
Posted by edtang at September 16, 2004 09:42 PM